


The loveless love the sweetest

by Kara_luna



Series: Everything changed the day Ozai got fucking yeeted to hell [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, BAMF everyone, BAMF hakoda, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, Fe, Female Zuko (Avatar), Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Explicit Sex, bamf zuko
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:02:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26417653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kara_luna/pseuds/Kara_luna
Summary: Part two of a small series.Zoka was not created to be loved.She was created to either burn or erupt and she's hellbent on doing neither. The southern watertribe is new and beautiful and different, and now she has these three children who care for her. Who want her for whatever reason and that fire in her breast that once smoldered for her daughter, is now alight again for the same purpose as before. Azula burned, but these children won't.Not this time. And if she has to burn the fire nation to the ground single handedly to do it? Win a war? Sell her freedom? Her soul? She'll do it, because Zoka's a protector and that's the only thing she's ever been proud of being. But she won't have to do it alone.It takes a while, but eventually that wall of "I have to do this by myself" is broken down in one shattered mess and a wolf comes stalking through, his pups tumbling over themselves and the song bird that they've adopted, on their way to her. It takes her a while, but she finally realizes...She's. Not. Alone.
Relationships: Aang & Katara (Avatar), Hakoda & Katara & Sokka (Avatar), Hakoda & Katara (Avatar), Hakoda & Sokka (Avatar), Hakoda & Zuko (Avatar), Hakoda/Zuko (Avatar), Katara & Gran Gran, Katara & Sokka (Avatar), Katara & Zuko (Avatar), Sokka & Zuko (Avatar)
Series: Everything changed the day Ozai got fucking yeeted to hell [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1920211
Comments: 17
Kudos: 249





	The loveless love the sweetest

**Author's Note:**

> Sooooooo I did a continuation?!?!?!?! I'm super surprised I did but you guys seemed to really want it so I was like what the heck I've got a few hours to spare lets do it!

Zoka is burned and scarred and a huge, scorched mess. She doesn’t know what he hopes to accomplish, but he won’t do it. 

His eyes linger on the nights she scrubs the dishes, burning like coals under her skin. For a moment, just a split second, Zoka finds it burns like the sun on her back rather than roaring flames. But then, like the fire’s been stoked, the burning intensifies until it’s painful. 

Until it’s _unbearable_ (familiar). 

Zoka’s not dumb, no matter how many times the court tittered at her lack of grace or subpar performance with her tutors - nothing is sacred in the fire palace, _nothing_ is secret, just a delayed rumor. No matter how much her father loomed over her shoulder as she did the same katas again and again until he deemed it acceptable. 

Until his hand raised in a disdainful dismissal rather than a wreath of orange. 

She’s not a fool and she’s not naive. She won’t fall for a man’s heated gaze anymore than she has any other time a noble boy got too close, tried to touch her, tried to _have her._ She burned brightly then, with no guilt and no mercy, and a wonderland of ice and snow will not change that. 

_Dammit_ blue eyes instead of gold _won’t change that._

The cloth nearly slides out of her fingers,’ she’s cleaning so furiously. Dropping the plates back into the steaming water, Zoka hangs her head back to the stars and just _b r e a t h e s._

The stars are like pockmarks in a deep blue quilt, little spaces where needles threaded fabric into other shades of the same color, criss crossing like the waves with a sea foam trim her people call Agni’s path. 

(He and his people call it Yue’s isle, the white snow inlaid with pearls rather than the ash left in a fire god’s wake. 

Fire destroys, eats, devours. 

Water heals, creates, births. 

Right?

They become steam when they touch, something unbendable by them both, something not of their element. 

Something new.

Right?

And the only ones who could control it are long gone now, with the exception of one little boy who knows not what he can do quite yet.

Right?)

The breeze riffles through her furs like a thousand fingers searching for sweets in her pockets, running through her braids and leaving wet prints across her cheeks. If she closes her eyes, she can image the wind is truly a hand brushing back her hair, cupping her cheek like… like… 

But her eyes are wide open and there’s no question in her mind that there is no one else here with her. Azula always lies her father had croned in her ear the day she’d searched for her daughter to say goodbye before her funeral march began. 

No, Azula is not the one who lies. It’s the gale who whispers pretty not-quite-truths in your ear when you’re at your most vulnerable, lurring you closer and closer to the cliff you’ll someday fling yourself from. 

(“Mama, what’s wrong? _Mama what’re you doing-_ **_STOP!”_ ** **)**

It’s the gale who snatches away your screams and whirls them to the heavens above where there isn’t one single spirit or god who cares enough to listen to them. Zoka isn’t stupid, she takes up her plates again and works on them in the chill of the night. 

Zoka isn’t a fool who would believe his intentions are anything less than swaying an enemy princess to the opposite side. 

_And Zoka is not a hostage either._

>>>>>>>>>

Zoka becomes a part of this world of theirs, this world of white and blue and community that she’s never had before, where secrets stay secret - not because you’re good at keeping them, but because you’re _allowed_ to keep some pieces of yourself for only you. 

A place where secrets can be more than our greatest shames. 

Zoka ignores the way her lungs stutter, she knows exactly what her secret is. The newest one that she holds closest to her breast when Aang asks her to teach him how to braid hair so he can help Katara with the small ones at the back of her head. 

The braids that her mother is meant to do because the only man that’s supposed to be doing it is her beloved. But it’s either Sokka, whose hands are made for twining wire and securing spear heads to sticks, or Zoka, so it’s no surprise to anyone she choses Aang. 

The look of disappointment and, most hurtful, _frustration_ that Katara gives her when Zoka asks if it’s alright that Aang do it puts her back in the place she belongs. Zoka’s got to comfortable with them already, and there are some lines she has no right to cross. 

Katara’s perfectly right to be irritated at the suggestion that Zoka may have been asking _for herself_ and not Aang. This secret in particular is her most shameful. Her face burns with it and she turns away from Katara’s gaze, watching watching watching, blue and so very familiar it makes her _ache._

>>>>>>>

She ignores him but his eyes never stop _looking._

She waits, skittish with an oyster shard clenched in her hand, each night. Watching the stars with a heart trying to escape her chest with how it pounds against the cage of her ribs. 

_Ba- Bum_

_Ba-Bum_

_Ba-Bum_

A scream catches in her throat when an arm snakes around her waist and it’s as if her body has stopped listening to her completely. She sits still, her heart bellowing in her ears, waiting waiting waiting. 

_Ba- Bum_

_Ba-Bum_

_Ba-Bum_

Slowly, carefully, like a rabbit-squirrel between the paws of a polar bear-dog, she rolls back towards the arm even as her mind shrieks with every creaking inch. Sokka’s snoring filters back into her awareness as she takes in his open mouthed slumbering. The ice in her veins slowly melts away as lava once again flows through her blood, returning the heat she almost completely lost. 

She tugs him forward into her arms and delights in the feeling of another sleeping in her protection. Zoka is a lot of things, but a protector will always be chief among them all. Not because she was born to be it, not because she was naturally gifted at - Azula would snort at that suggestion with the fond memories of her awkward, arms length holding of her daughter when she was still young and squirming - but because it is what the world has shaped her to be. 

And that will always matter more. 

Not what we’re born as, but what we have become to fit better in our section of the world’s grand scheme. And sometimes, when we’re particularly ambitious and uncompromising and _hopeful,_ we become a shape that fits nowhere in that great tapestry. 

And 

we 

_break_

_the_

_mold._

>>>>>>>>>>>>

Zoka freezes the first time Katara slips and calls her mom while wide awake. 

It’s one thing to mumble it while half delirious and unconscious, completely unaware in every sense of the word. She could have been dreaming of her mother, could have said it without it having the slightest thing to do with Zoka, but _this. This_ is different. 

This is damning. 

They’re the only ones present, the men off hunting and Gran Gran supervising the digging of another fishing trench, and Zoka is thankful those words were for her alone. 

She takes a moment to savor it. To love the title she once held and may perhaps hold again someday. But Zoka is not cruel and she will not impose her image over that of their true mother, the one her people murdered. 

The one her father murdered. 

She says nothing and Katara’s eyes are unreadable and deep as the sea, their depths hidden away in darkness without a touch of light to uncover the truth, slowly looking up from the braids she’s putting back into her hair. Away from the decorative beads that each hold the memory of a loved one. They’re all blue with the exception of one. One of them is a bright royal purple and the five blue ones tell her exactly how big of a mistake those words were. 

Zoka leaves with the breathy excuse of needing to get more water for dinner. 

They never speak of it again. 

>>>>>>>

Zoka wishes they’d spoken of it again. 

>>>>>>>

“A festival of spirit guides.” Gran Gran tells her, clothes of every shade of blue from white to black, thrown over her arms. 

“But why- ow - do I- ow - have to- _ow_ \- go!” She gasps out, trying to squirm away from the woman’s iron grip. Aang’s giggling from his perch under Katara’s careful, paint laden hands, perfectly content in his glittering white coat - anorak - and trousers of a the lightest azure turning steadily darker until the cloth over his boots are black. 

The traitor. He can stay warm without the clothes but of course he’s not going to help her _not_ be pulled into all of this. She understands it’s their culture but _really?_ The spotted snow leopard cloak Katara has laced over a midnight blue shirt is just too much. 

Zoka has never even _heard_ of a snow leopard, she is a _grown adult,_ and she does _not_ want to be shoved under all those bulky furs the kids and even Gran Gran are cocooned in. Firebenders naturally run hot and exercise, like gasoline on fire, only make that inner flame flare brighter. 

The thought of dancing with all that fanfare on is _horrifying._

Gran Gran signs, most likely sensing her negative thoughts. 

“I suppose this is not to your liking then?” Dramatically she sighs again and Zoka’s stomach drops to her feet. “I suppose I shall get the old antlers out and a caribou will fit your tastes better, hm?”

Zoka shakes her head so hard she’s sure she’s going to lose it any second now and grabs the cloth from the woman’s shoulders without even looking at it before she’s bolting for the kitchen. Antlers are… She’ll wear the giant leopard coat if she can get out of _antlers._

Zoka’s only known Gran Gran for a relatively short time compared to her grandchildren, but she’s very aware of how idle that old crone’s threats are, thank you very much. 

She strips off her outer layers, debating over the underclothes as she’s already shivering and her teeth chattering, but she makes the decision to pull those off to. Dark hair tumbles over her shoulder, black ink spilling over white skin that still brings her discomfort in this land of dark skin and earthen hair. 

The cloth is actually light when she lifts it from the fold of her arm. The fabric isn’t blue like she’d thought originally, but a shimmering twilight of blue bordering on violet and purple easing into a flash of deep scarlet when she shifts it just right into the light. 

Flickering into each shade of color she can image just like the flames she once watched crease Azula’s hair like a crown of embers. (The crown that should always have been her’s, not Zoka’s, but now will be no one’s, forever and always.)

Tears prickle at the edges of her eyes at the gesture - the _beautiful_ gesture - and she slips the silk and sleek fur over her head and arms, watching wondrously as it molds to her very skin. Its… Agni its just…

It’s _perfect._ (Her mother would have loved it for her wedding day)

It’s unlike Katara’s or Gran Gran’s, a gown rather than an anorak and trousers. The fabric is heavy but light at the same time, sleek but incredibly warm. She moves and the light dances over her shoulder blades - and Zoka can see the snow leopard pattern hidden beneath the swath of dark colors. 

Glancing over her shoulder, she can see where the pattern curls over her shoulder and down her back, turning white as an actual leopard’s coat in a burst like an exploding star across her mid back before twisting back into the darkness of a sleeping sun. 

The white, patterned mask fashioned like the sharp face of a what she assumes is a leopard, catlike as it is, is even beautiful in its simplicity, tumbling out of the fabric into her arms as if meant to be there. The hollowed bone feels like fate. 

It’s truly too much and she wants to strip it off and give it to someone worthy of it. Someone without a horrific scar across their face. Someone who can do the exquisite dyeing justice. But… When she moves before the glass frame propped by the wall, Zoka can see someone else in the reflection. 

A woman with a straight back and high cheekbones, slanted eyes and an upturned chin. Slightly crooked nose at the arch, legs teetering on the edge of gangly, hardly any curves but a flare at the hips that speaks of decent mother barring potential. 

She’s her mother in the legs that stretch longer than they should and the straight black hair that falls over pale shoulders down to her waist, but she’s Ursula in the sharpness to her lids and dip in her lip that’s not quite a cupid’s bow. 

She’s Azula in the athletic build that’s straight, unapologetic lines and muscular thighs that give her the slightest of curves despite all the training she’s lived through since childhood. All the curves her father no doubt wanted of her so desperately. 

Heirs were all she was good for in the first year. 

And the second year. 

And the third. 

Fourth.

Fifth. 

Then her mother was gone and his source of heirs was gone with her. 

She began to learn diplomacy, though incredibly briefly and with a very manipulative spin to it, at seven.

Eight she was burning through the material, quickly moving to more and more advanced material as her father’s back remained in her view. 

Nine was when that impenetrable back began to tilt to one side, head moving slightly as if hearing something far off. That was the year she defeated her bending tutor in a spar. 

Ten marked the year he glanced over that huge back and _saw her._

Agni she wishes he’d never saw her. 

Deep breath, cleanse herself, deep breath, remember where she is, deep breath, and _keep breathing._

Zoka comes when Gran Gran calls and doesn’t have enough awareness left in her to ask where Sokka is. 

>>>>>>>>>

The bonfire is alive with noise and dance. 

Woman whirl around each other as if choreographed, fluid and ever shifting to accommodate every new member of the steps. Like the sea, shifting, moving, forward changing with sea foam capped waves crashing on crystal beaches she can practically taste the sea salt from. 

Gran Gran joins the circle of elders within the center, seated in a tight formation around the flames with their heads bent in prayer. They look ethereal, like the hunched sisters burdened with the task of cutting each thread of life under the watchful eyes of each person’s respective god. 

Agni watches over the threads of fire, Tui and La over those of water, the badgermole spirit - Ginzahn - observes those threaded of rock and earth, and lastly, the strings of air are - were - governed by Xaculk - the first air bison who flew to the stars to became one of them, passing on his gift of flight to those who came after. 

Perhaps Xaculk only watches over Aang now. It makes her wonder, though, where the mighty god of wind was while his people screamed. 

_While his children_ **_burned._ **

“Come on!” Aang yells behind her and Zoka jolts from the thoughts that seem to be getting heavier and heavier, catching her awareness in a net she’s finding harder and harder to escape from. 

“I know, I know.” She smiles thinly as he takes off, forever a ball of energy, practically floating with Katara’s hand clutched in his own. The women who dance, firelight catching their pelts, wear similar garments to her. 

They’re a _woman’s_ clothes, she realizes. 

Glancing at Gran Gran and the older woman, the not so old ones who stay on the outside of the circle dancing in pairs, and the younger ones still, who dance with stones of blue at their throats, Zuko feels a flush take over her face. 

The women dancing in the middle change partners as if one big dance they’re all equally part of, but as she watches a couple break away. One has the brunette hair she’s come to see as water tribe, but the other has hair down to her waist that’s curled like wildflowers twisting together, locks bright like the fading orange of the sun. 

Their matching leopard fur dresses whirl around each other as they twist through each other’s arms with beautiful smiles, wild animals contained in thin human skin. 

A hand is suddenly before her and Zoka blinks in surprise, comprehending that she’s alone now. Alone on the outside of the circle looking in. The hand is large and tanned, and she hesitates, glancing at the masked face half a head above her own. 

A wolf’s mask. 

Clean lines of blood red and orange and blue curl over each bend, sharpening the cunning eyes and bringing out the fangs at his mouth, but they have nothing on his _eyes._ The blue catches the light and _burns._

She finds it suddenly very difficult to find the breath she’s lost somewhere along the way. Her hand lifts, hesitating only a second. Her eyes instinctually go to the center, as if sensing that Gran Gran is looking her way. 

She’s right, and the old bat grins cheekily, jerking her head before hunching back over as if she’d never done anything at all. Zoka turns to the figure, wolves’ fur clad over strong copper arms, tall and silent and _waiting._

_Patient,_ even as she ignores him. 

Even as she hesitates. 

Shoving aside the fear, the inadequacy. She’s in a beautiful dress, lined with the fur of a fierce snow leopard, and her father is a million leagues away where he can do _nothing_ to control her anymore. He has no _right_ to influence her even now that she’s escaped him. 

Azula would have shoved her forward into the man if she was still here. 

She slips her pale hand into his and is shocked with hot, white lightening at the way his fingers swallow hers, the scrape of his callouses making her legs shake just slightly. His laughing eyes make her smile tentatively. Trying out the feeling on her lips. 

He swings her to the right, and she’s almost scared she’s about to fall and make a fool of herself, when her hand is gently captured again and she’s brought back into his grasp. The hand at her waist steadies her even as firelight dances on her skin and the press of bodies around her sets her on fire like she’s never felt before. 

He spins her and steadies her and dips her and catches her and is everywhere at once, and Zoka throws her head back and laughs. She smiles until her cheeks hurt and _lives,_ because dammit her father isn’t _here._

_Because she’s alive and Azula_ **_isn’t,_ ** _so fucking_ **_live._ **

The man’s hands slip to her waist and she’s lifted so easily her hands grasp onto his shoulders in surprise as he spins her in the air like she’s flying. When he brings her back, she’s spun wide before being pulled to him, front to back. 

She feels no lick of shame at leaning into his chest. The muscles shift beneath her shoulder blades and Zoka feels _safe._ His fingers firmly gripping her waist aren’t scary like they once would have been, but exhilarating. 

His mouth presses, open and hot, against the crease in her neck and she lets him, panting harder and harder as the flaming men and woman dance around them in a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes and _life._

“Do you know why the women wear snow leopards’ pelts, and the men, wolves’ fur?” His chest rumbles against her spine and the chills take over any cognitive thought process she could be having. 

“No, why?” She breaths, eyes slitted close. She briefly registers how her body is curving towards his, seeking his warmth and comfort in a way that’s primal and animalistic and all instinct. In a way that is nothing like the detached emotions of the fire nation nobility, but the backbone of everything the water tribe is. 

She finds she doesn’t mind it, not when he’s there behind her holding her - not like someone to worship - but like someone he wants to _touch._ He chuckles against her back and he brings her into a gentle sway, matching with the beating of the drums she can barely hear over her own heart beat. Or perhaps there are no drums and it’s been her heart the whole time. 

Beating harder and harder like a bloodhound searching for something it can’t see. Something it doesn’t know until it’s found it. 

“A wolf is a predator. Predators do not mate with prey, they mate with an equal.” He rumbles in her ear. 

Zoka knows that voice, just like a part of her recognized those eyes before she took that leap of faith, but her body relaxes with _relief._ All those logical reasons, all those logical explanations, gone. All she can think is of the pelts brushing her skin and the wolf mask scraping gently on her neck where it’s been pushed up. 

His lips forming words on her shoulder makes her shudder with that animalistic _need._

And the human thoughts, the human thinking processes, are all silenced by the yowl of a leopard twining like a harmony with a wolf’s howl, echoing in her ears with her heart as if a primal melody as old as time itself. 

And perhaps it is. 

Turning, she meets his eyes, lips so close his breath is warming her tongue. 

“How can a wolf mate with a leopard? How can two different creatures become something as one?” 

“Would you like me to show you?” He catches the edge of her mask, brushing his thumb over the etchings of black and blue and white, and Zoka belatedly realizes he’s the only one with any color other than a variation of blue on their mask. 

It makes her answer so much easier. 

“ _Yes.”_

>>>>>>>>>>>

She wakes to an ache between her thighs that’s sore and sweet. 

There is no blood slick on her fingers, no true pain, no bruises but those scattered along her shoulder and neck. She wakes slowly, covered in warmth with the press of skin along every edge of her body. 

Gentle breaths across her forehead tell her by their evenness that he’s still asleep, a man of the moon while she’s a woman of the sun. Opposites but the same but different but identical. And none of it matters, because she’s tucked under his chin, hands pressed above the dull thump of his heart. 

The only thing separating them, skin. Skin that flexed under her fingers. Skin that entered her and filled her completely and made her wail and gasp, dig fingernails into the tender flesh of his back for purchase, and give in as much as conquer. 

There’s no stickiness between her legs or anywhere else in the nest of furs she’s found herself laid under, an arm arched over her waist to keep her close and warm and there. 

As if she wouldn’t stay forever if she could. 

He’d brought a warm cloth up her thighs, sliding it over her center, pushing in at her core just to hear her whimper in bliss, just to feel her push his fingers _deeper._ Zoka suspects it was his plan all along. For her to thread her fingers through his hair and pull him back down inside her, to pull him closer until he speared the knot at her crux and she’d wailed anew. 

But once she’d exhausted herself beyond anything she’d ever experienced, he’s picked up the cloth one more time and wiped his seed from the innermost place of her thighs and down until the very last of it was gone. 

He’d only pulled her contentedly tired body closer to his, arranged the pelts over her until every bit of her was warm and sheltered, and only then had he laid back himself. She’d resisted his attempts to turn her though, pushing her nose into the curve of his shoulder instead. 

He’d chuckled as he’d done at the dance of fire and water and light, and kissed the crown of her head so tenderly she’d felt like crying or laughing, so she’d settled for a smile against the hard planes of his flesh. 

Placing her other hand beside the first, Zoka feels for Hakoda’s heart beat again, running fingertips over the tanned flesh until she can feel the hum of life under her palms. 

_Ba-Bum_

_Ba-Bum_

_Ba-Bum_

_Ba-Bum_

  
  
  



End file.
